Yes, That is a Very Great Amount of Augustinian Manuscripts

Recently I read a reference to the "literally myriad" manuscripts of the works of Augustine of Hippo.

At first I mistakenly thought that Aristitle's manuscripts were being described as literally myriad. I looked up the word myriad, learned that it literally means ten thousand, wondered how someone knew for sure that there were that many manuscripts of Aristotle, did some research and learned some interesting things about the transmission of Aristotle, but without any indication that anyone had ever actually attempted to count up all the Aristotelian manuscripts, before realizing that the reference to myriad manuscripts had been to Augustine.

It proved to be much easier to find out how someone could, with great assurance, state that there are over 10,000 manuscripts of Augustine. I will go that one better, and state that there are over 15,000. I can do this because of a series of publications known as Die handschriftlichen Überlieferungen der Werke des Heiligen Augustinus.

That's German for The Manuscripts of the Works of Saint Augustine. (I could be snarky and translate "handschriftlichen Überlieferungen" exactly, as "manual transmissions," instead of accurately as "manuscripts," but I won't.) Beginning in 1969, the Austrian Academy of Sciences began publishing these volumes, and there are now at least 14 volumes, each volume devoted to the Augustinian manuscripts in a particular region of the world, and they have listed over 15,000 of them, and I gather that they are not done yet.

They are doing this because Augustine wrote a great many works, including letters, sermons and what we today would call books, and theologians, historians of early Christianity and other interested in Augustine would like to find as many of them as they can. Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der Werke des Heiligen Augustinus is the latest and most thorough attempt to account for all of the Augustinian manuscripts, and it has indeed led to the discovery of missing works, and I gather that it is assumed that more manuscripts will certainly be found, and hoped that currently-missing works will be found among them.

This is certainly thrilling for those who are passionately interested in Augustine. For those less passionate about him and his writings, these volumes help to understand why such exhaustive lists aren't made for every ancient author: the great majority of the entries say "s XV," "fifteenth century," or "s XIV," "fourteenth century," and "cart," "paper." It's rather monotonous. The chances of, oh, say, for instance, a palimpsest of a missing text by Livy lurking under the top text one of the recent manuscripts on paper are much less than with older manuscripts on parchment. And that's only one of very many reasons why, generally speaking, manuscripts become much more interesting when they are older.

Back when I had thought that I read that there are more than 10,000 manuscripts of Aristotle, I learned that there are a tremendous number of manuscripts of Latin translations of Aristotle, so tremendous that it seems possible, if manuscripts of translations are counted in the grand total, that the manuscripts of Aristotle may, in fact, be myriad.

Well, an inspection of some of the volumes of Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der Werke des Heiligen Augustinus seem to indicate that it is, in fact, conventional to count such translations among the number of the manuscripts of an author.

And now I'm also wondering whether there has been any serious attempt to list all of the manuscripts of the Bible. Seek and perhaps I shall find. I'm guessing that the most which may have been done is to attempt to list all of the Bible texts from one particular century in one particular language. But that is, I cannot stress this enough, only a guess. Like my guess that the total number of Biblical manuscripts, if ever it were known, would dwarf the number of Augustinian manuscripts.

Dream Log: Joining the FBI; and Elizabeth Banks

I dreamed that I had joined the FBI, or was in training in hopes of eventually joining the FBI. All of us trainees lived in a dorm. Everyone associated with the training facility, trainees, trainers and administration, all dressed in the stereotypical FBI outfit: black suit, white shirt, black necktie, black shiny shoes. We were all dressed like that all of the time, including during our firearms training, physical conditioning -- long runs and obstacles courses -- and martial-arts training.

Except that I didn't have the shiny black shoes. Instead, I was wearing old sneakers, one with a white shoelace and the other with a black shoelace. I tried to be casual about it and pretend that there was nothing unusual about my shoes, but the trainers made snarky remarks about old beat-up shoes, without ever referring specifically to me, but I felt ostracized.

Finally, one of the trainers came up to me and told me that my shoes were non-regulation. I replied that the sneakers gave me good traction when I was running and chasing someone. The trainer bent a leg so that the sole of one of his shoes was showing. He pointed to the sole and told me that FBI agents wore shoes with soles that gave just as much traction as any shoes'.

Eventually I began to feel overwhelmed. Besides my embarrassment over my shoes, the pace of the training began to overwhelm me physically. (Not surprising, considering that I am 56 years old.) I approached the trainer who had told me that I was wearing the wrong shoes, and told him that I couldn't keep up and wanted to quit. I repeated this several times, but the trainer kept turning away and ignoring me. Finally he took a cell phone from a pocket and made a call. I couldn't hear what he was saying. Then a woman came into the room where the other trainees were doing martial-arts exercises. Unlike everyone else in our suits, she was wearing an all-white outfit, short-sleeved shirt, slacks and shoes, like a nurse or some other worker at a hospital might wear. She looked like Elizabeth Banks. The trainer looked at her and gestured at me and walked away.

The woman led me to a chair, told me to sit down and take off my suit-jacket and shirt. I still had a white T-shirt on. She began to massage my arms and hands. She was very skilled at that, and I felt great waves of tension leaving me. Another woman joined us, also dressed in a white nurse's outfit, and took over the arms-and-hands massage, while the woman who looked like Elizabeth Banks began to massage my scalp.

I began to reconsider whether I wanted to quit the FBI. I also began to wonder whether I would get more pleasant treatment if I continued to complain about not being able to do what the other, younger recruits were doing. Than I woke up.

Gregory the Great and Classical Latin

A number of years ago, when I was even more obviously a layman when it comes to Classical Studies than I am now, I and a prominent Classical scholar exchanged a number of emails. He very generously took the time to answer various questions I had about the transmission of Classical Latin literature. He answered every one of my emails thoroughly and with amazing promptness. I am even more amazed now by his generosity towards me than I was at the time, because now I know somewhat more about the enormous amount of work this man has done in finding, reading, editing and commenting upon manuscripts of ancient Latin. He wasn't just sitting around with nothing to do when I, a nobody, contacted him.

One of my questions I posed to this scholar concerned the authority of the suggestion by Oxford professor Albert C Clark, in his 1921 paper "The Reappearance of the Texts of the Classics," that Gregory the Great, Pope from 590 to 604, had "burnt all manuscripts of Livy which he could find." My correspondent said that he was aware of Prof Clark's assertion and flatly rejected it as being an anecdote without any evidence, and added that he was an atheist, so he wasn't grinding an ax. Which surprised me a little, since I hadn't written a word about Christian belief or atheism or ax-grinding. It surprises me a little less now, since in the intervening years I have experienced a tremendous amount of ax-grinding on the part of apologists and atheists on the subject of how, how much and why Classical Latin declined during the Dark Ages. (By "Dark Ages" I -- and many others -- mean the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century AD, and the rise of Charlemagne's Empire around AD 800.)

The earliest reference I have yet been able to find to Gregory's deliberate destruction of manuscripts of Livy was written by William of Malmesbury, over 500 years after Gregory's death. [PS, 29 Mar 2018: Perhaps eventually I will learn not to trust my memory, but to check and be certain before claiming that So-and-so wrote such-and-such. It seems that William wrote no such thing, and that his contemporary, John of Salisbury, wrote that Gregory burned some pagan books, but with no mention of Livy. See the comments below. My apologies. The search continues for where Prof Clark may have gotten the idea that Gregory burned manuscripts of Livy.] I don't find that length of time, in and of itself, to be a convincing reason to reject William's report: Gregory was a tremendously powerful figure, tremendously well-respected all over the Catholic world long after his death, certainly still in William's time, and it would have been dangerous to publicly say scandalous things about him, but that doesn't mean that things could not have been privately, and accurately, said. More convincing evidence against the burning than those 500 years, it seems to me, is how expensive parchment was in the Dark Ages, and how widespread the practice of palimpsesting: the earlier pagan text was scraped off of the parchment, and a Christian text written in its place. The pagan text was just as thoroughly gone as if it had been burned, or so the palimpsester would've thought at the time. But they were wrong. Since the late 18th century, with the aid of various modern technologies, we have been able to recover some of those palimpsested pagan texts, reading them just from the indentations they left behind.

2 of the 8 manuscripts of Livy written before Gregory's time which are known to still exist survive only as palimpsests. One of these, now preserved as Biblioteca Capitolare XL (38) in Verona,

was overwritten with a text by Gregory. This can be shrugged off as a hilarious coincidence -- but should it be?

The fact is that many Classical Latin texts, including the approximately 3/4 of Livy's huge long history of Rome which we don't have today, began to disappear in the late 6th century. How do we know this? Because those Classical texts were quoted up until the late 6th century, and then not later, ever -- unless they miraculously appeared later, like the other palimpsest of Livy, Palatinus Lat. 24 in the Vatican Library, which was found, in the late 18th century, to contain a palimpsest of a 1000-word-long passage from book 91 of Livy, a passage which no-one had seen in a very, very long time.

Okay, so a lot of ancient Latin literature went missing during the same time that Gregory was rising toward the Papacy -- should we therefore assume that it went missing because of Gregory?

Yes! We shouldn't paint Christians of the period with a broad brush. It is known that some of them supported the preservation of Classical literature and that some of them did not. It is known that Gregory did not -- and that he was by far the most powerful man of his time in Catholic Christendom, the entire area where Latin was the primary written language. He is only one of 3 Popes to have been called "the Great," and I'll bet most of you can't name either of the other 2. It was he who came up with the 7 Deadly Sins. He thought volcanoes were Hell overflowing because it was so full of damned souls, and that the End was Near. He was sainted immediately after his death by popular acclaim. When a man had that much influence and disapproved of the Latin Classics, it's no more than common sense to assume that he had a lot to do with the way that they disappeared en masse on his watch, and to ask that the burden of prove be placed on those attempting to demonstrate that he did not.

Apologists will snort and laugh at my claim that Gregory caused much of the literary legacy of ancient Rome to disappear. They will accuse me of painting with a broad brush, despite my having said that some Dark Age Christians helped to preserve Classical Latin. Benedict of Nursia and Cassiodorus are 2 great examples. They themselves, the apologists, will paint with a broad brush, such as when they claim that every time that non-Christians waged war in the Dark Ages, it meant the wholesale destruction of written material including the Classics, and that every time Christians of the same period waged war, it did not.

As in every case of historical controversy, I advise those who really want to know to turn to the primary sources.

I'm angry, angry at Gregory, and I'm not bothering to try to hide it. Does this mean that I'm grinding an ax, or that I'm considering things which would make any reasonable person angry?

Dream Log: Hollywood Party

I dreamed I was at a party in the house of a Hollywood executive. Most of the party guests were also executives at movie studios. It was dark inside the house. The exterior walls of the house were glass, and almost all of the light we had came from the bright security lights on the lawn, and from the security lights of the neighbors. To one side of the house, several lawns away, surf broke on a beach and reflected the bright white lights.

I was lying down on a sofa and trying to sleep, but the commotion of the party made this impossible.

The lady of the house grabbed me by the arm, pulled me to my feet and proceeded to give me an uninteresting tour of the house. Several times during the tour she asked me if I was homeless. Each time, I told her I wasn't, but she seemed either not to be listening, or not to believe me.

After dragging me around one lap of the house, the hostess let me go in the room where we had started, and I sat down on one of the several sofas in the room.

Across the room from me was a very pleasant-looking woman. She had shoulder-length hair which hung down straight except for one thin braid. We looked at each other for a very long time. In waking life, I very rarely maintain eye contact, because I'm autistic. In the dream, the eye contact also felt very intense. Gradually, the woman began to smile. She walked across the room to me, said she was going to the kitchen, and asked if she could bring me something. I told her I'd like a glass of water. She asked if that was really all I wanted from the kitchen. I assured her that it was.

When she returned, I said that I assumed she was an actress, because she was very attractive. "Thank you, she said, "but actually, I'm a paleographer. I specialize in the Carolingian minuscule. That's --"

"Oh, I know what the Carolingian minuscule is," I replied. "I'm very interested in the transmission of the Latin Classics."

"So you're a Classicist?" she asked.

"No. Well, maybe just barely one. An amateur Classicist, at any rate. So, how did a paleographer end up at a party full of movie-industry muckety-mucks?"

"I'm working on a project at the Getty," she said. (The Getty is a huge museum located in two places in Los Angeles, which contains paintings, sculpture and many other things, including a significant collection of manuscripts.) "The project is being financed by one of the guests here tonight. And you? How did you end up at this party? Are you a movie executive, to finance your love of the Classics?"

"No, I'm afraid I'm only an essayist. And I don't remember how I got to this party," I said.

We agreed to leave the movie executives behind and walk down to the beach. Dawn was beginning to break. The horizon over the ocean began to turn pink. Every minute or so, someone ran past just where the sand began to get wet, in running clothes, except barefoot. They ran very, very fast. I told the lovely paleographer that I had the impression that movie stars tended to exercise harder than professional athletes. She said it seemed that way to her as well. Then I woke up.

Should I Buy A Rolex as an Investment?

No! You should not buy any watches as investments. Watches are not a sound investment. Real estate and mutual funds are. The only sensible reason to buy a watch is because you want to have that watch. This is especially important if it's going to be the only watch you own, or if you're going to wear it almost every day. If there's something on your wrist between 8 and 24 hours a day which makes you happy every time you look at it, that's a very significant thing. Some people like very light watches, so light that you can barely feel it there on your wrist; some people, like me, go completely the other way, and think that heavier is better. The watch you wear should give YOU pleasure. If you got a certain watch because certain other people like it, but it's not the kind that YOU like, well, then, in my opinion, that's just sad. Life's too short to go around trying to impress air-headed fashion-mongers.

(I should certainly hope that it goes without saying that if you don't care about watches at all, the most sensible thing would be not to wear a watch, and to read things like this post because my writing style is gorgeous.)

True, Rolex tends to hold its value better than other brands, but that's only because of the Rolex snobs and the lack of knowledge about other brands. It was not so long ago that, if you asked many people in the US to name luxury watch brands, they'd say, "Rolex..." and then go completely blank. That's beginning to change.

Rolex makes fine watches, there's nothing at all wrong with them, but as the watch-buying public becomes better informed about Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, A Laenge & Soehne, Omega, Breguet, MB&F, URWERK, Ulysse Nardin, IWC, Chopard, Blancpain, Panerai, Grand Seiko, Piaget, Girard Perregaux and the other high-quality brands which have been there all along, then most likely Rolex watches will no longer be unique in the way they hold their market value over time.

But there's no guarantee about that, either. Watch prices, like the prices of any other luxury goods, have to do above all with the psychology of the people who buy them. People's attitudes about watches, and the inherent quality of those watches, are two separate things.

If you listen to people who say that watches are a good investment, you're likely to hear some irrational statements. Like saying that some watches are "worth what I paid for them," when someone paid $5000 for a watch in 1960 which is worth $5000 today. (If he had spent that $5000 on a house in 1960, depending on its location, he might be able to rent it for 3 months for $5000 today.) Or that "some Rolex watches have risen spectacularly in value over time," ignoring the way that other Rolex watches have not. Not to mention the way that some non-Rolex models have risen spectacularly in value over time.

Still -- to repeat what I said above -- if you really, really want a Rolex, if wearing one makes you happy, and you can afford one -- buy it! Buy it, wear it and let it make you happy! Even if you're surrounded by non-Rolex snobs who wear Pateks or AP's and sneer at your Rolex. Screw them!

There probably are a few people out there who actually can make a living by buying and selling old watches. But they're about as rare as people who can make a good living playing poker. And, unfortunately, like the poker players, the watch dealers often depend on meeting a lot of suckers who think they're good at the game, when they're not.

Was Ovid Actually Exiled?

For centuries, students learned that Ovid, the great Roman poet (the greatest ancient writer of Latin in my personal opinion, and in the opinion of some others, although many or most might rank him below Vergil), spent the last years of his life in exile in Tomis, the present-day Constanța, Romania, a desolate, frozen outpost on the coast of the Black Sea, because of, in his own words, "a poem and a mistake." This punishment has often been seen as excessive. In about 10 years of wretched exile, beginning in AD 8, Ovid wrote several works full of sadness and bitterness and longing for the city of Rome -- so everyone has been led to believe.

On the 14th of December, 2017, Rome's city council unanimously pardoned Ovid.

And then, yesterday, on the 18th of March, 2018, I learned -- I must say: to my great amazement -- that some scholars do not believe that Ovid was actually exiled. In 1911 JJ Hartman raised the possibility that the exile was an invention on Ovid's part. O Janssen, in 1951, accepted the thesis that the exile had not taken place, as did C Verhoeven in 1979, F Brown in 1985, and H Hofmann in 2001. So far, I haven't been able to learn much more about these scholars than their names. Other scholars have come to the conclusion that Ovid was exiled, but not to Tomis; and it seems to be generally agreed upon, by those who have looked into the matter more closely, that Ovid's account of Tomis is unreliable in some significant respects: for example, it seems that the climate was not quite as cold as Ovid describes it; and it also strains credulity when Ovid claims that no-one in the place besides him spoke either Latin or Greek, because Tomis had been a Roman colony for decades before Ovid's arrival, and was under Greek control for centuries after that. Literary, documentary, numismatic and archaeological evidence all undermine the previous status of these late writings of Ovid as realistic depictions of Tomis.

Apart from a couple of brief mentions by later Roman writers, all that we know, or all that we used to think that we knew, about Ovid's exile, came from Ovid's own later works Ibis (the title refers to the bird also known in English as the ibis), an elegant but violent torrent of abuse and threats toward some unknown object, referred to only as Ibis; Tristia (Sadness), and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters From the Sea-Coast, letters in verse addressed to the Imperial family, begging to be allowed to return home). Traditionally, all these works have been regarded as quite wretchedly sad; however, it seems we must re-evaluate them, in one way or another: If Ovid really was exiled to Tomis, then he exaggerated how awful the place was; if he was exiled to some other place, then perhaps he made up a fictional Tomis, perhaps as a metaphorical expression of his sadness.

Or, whether Ovid was exiled to Tomis, or to some other place, or not exiled at all, perhaps it's been all wrong all along to regard the works "from the sea-coast" as being sad at all. Maybe they're meant to be understood to be sarcastic and funny responses to -- who knows what? Maybe to no longer being invited into the presence of the Imperial family. Maybe to a punishment even less severe than that.

Or maybe Ovid really was exiled to Tomis, and maybe he really was very sad there, and maybe he exaggerated some of the aspects of the place in hopes of winning mercy and permission to return home.

Or maybe quite a few other things. In any case, we now have the knowledge these "exile writings," if you no longer believe that Ovid was exiled, or exile writings, with no quotation marks, if you still believe that he was, are much less realistic than had been believed.

Good News Bad News

On January 20, 2017, I didn't think Trump's Presidency would last into 2018, not because I think the Republicans in Congress are good people, but because I thought they'd be smart enough to see that Trump would drag them down if they stuck with him. And he is dragging them down. #BigBlueTsunami Like Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward about Nixon's WH staff: "These are not very bright guys." (I'm talking about the present-day Congressional Republicans; in the case of Trump's WH staff, it's obvious enough that you don't need a muttering chain-smoking insider wearing a trench coat in a parking garage to point it out to you in the middle of the night.)

The good news, and also the bad news, is that the GOP is actually so dumb -- as a whole, with some isolated exceptions ignored by the majority as they scream and rave about what the party is doing to itself -- that they think they have to stand by Trump. They either can't see that that will lead to them losing huge in the mid-terms, or they do see that, but think they have no alternative.

The alternative is shockingly obvious: impeach Trump and remove him from office, as quickly as possible, go with Pence. That alternative was going to be better for them the sooner they did it. They've done huge damage to themselves as a party by putting it off for so long, but it still would be a better alternative than continuing to pretend that they don't see that Trump is a crook, a perv, a traitor and an unstable psycho.

The good news is that Republicans in Congress are actually going to stick with Trump. This is good news because it means that many of them will lose their seats to Democrats in November.

The bad news is that Republicans in Congress are actually going to stick with Trump. This is bad news because Trump has no respect for the rule of law or for anything else, and no decency, and no brains, and that, because Trump is what he is, we -- by "we" I mean human beings -- might all be dead by November.

Never say never. I suppose it's possible that eventually, some awful shocking thing oozing from the Trump administration could actually be awful and shocking to Trump's base, which would lead the Congressional GOP to action. But of course, Trump's base make the Congressional GOP look like a cross between the Algonquin Round Table and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This is why a political party's elite should actually lead the base instead of following it.

(But the Republican elite is actually too dumb to grasp that, which is where I came in. From Lincoln, to this: that is a long, long, long drop, even when you consider that it took a century and a half.)

Perspective

What makes an object pleasing or not? So much depends upon perspective.

This is a recent travel guide to Japan, published by one of the world's leaders in travel guides,



about 600 pages long, with, I'm guessing somewhere between 200 and 400 high-quality photographs taken in contemporary Japan. And assuming I didn't miss any, only 6 of those photographs show ground transportation vehicles: 1 picture of a bullet train, 2 of urban street traffic, 1 showing 2 taxicabs parked outside of a department store, 1 of a robot riding a bicycle at a science fair, and 1 of a tractor in a rice field. There is a also a picture of engines being manufactured inside a factory.

This is in a guide to the country which is the home of Honda, Accura, Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, Infiniti, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Suzuki, Yamaha and Kawasaki, a country which manufactures about 10 million cars, trucks and buses a year, plus who knows how many motorcycles and bicycles, not me, is who. The city of Yokohama gets 6 pages of coverage, but the tires of the same name are not mentioned anywhere in the volume.

Is this a problem? I don't think it is. I doubt that very many people have approached this volume expecting it to contain a lot of info about the Japanese transportation industry. The guide does contain a lot of information about Japanese hotels and restaurants. How well does it describe the best that Japan has to offer in this regard? I have no idea, because I know practically nothing about Japanese hotels and restaurants.

I'm sure some of you are dying to know: no, I did not find any information in this guide about Japanese watches. (This is my Seiko 5.

There are many like it, but this one is mine.) If half or more of the information in a 600-page travel guide to Japan pertained to Japanese watches, you and I might be delighted, but most travelers to Japan would be disappointed and puzzled.

The Latest Liberal "Bag of Nothing"

How dare these "Hollywood liberals" imply that anyone has ever suggested that anyone from the Trump administration has ever had any contact with anyone or anything which is Russian? I was hanging out with Jared Kushner recently, and he happened to see a bottle of vodka, and he had no idea what it was. He was about to try to use it to remove some dirt from ones of his shoes before I explained to him that vodka is something that people drink. By the way, he also had no idea what Russia was. He thought that Russia was a skin disease which cats sometimes get if they aren't ingesting a proper mix of vitamins. I had to explain to him that Russia is a large country extending from eastern Europe in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east.

Imagine Kushner's consternation, when I told him that some "liberals" like Mueller are trying to frame him for having improper dealings with people from a foreign country which, until recently, he had assumed was a feline skin disease!

Just try to imagine to shock felt by Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, Anthony Scaramucci, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Wilbur Ross, Michael R Caputo, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Roger Stone and others, including Michael Cohen, Nigel Farage, Erik Prince (who some liberal hotheads describe as the founder of something they call "Blackwater") and Peter W Smith, at these so-called "allegations" that they have unreported business ties and contacts with officials, business people, banks and intelligence agencies from a country which they all had assumed was a cat's skin disease, and not a country at all, and that intelligence operatives from this so-called "country" are in possession of compromising personal and financial information about the President of the United States, and that there are all kinds of photographs and video and audio of half or more of them actually in this so-called "country" consorting with its government officials and various cronies of this murky figure to whom liberal refer as "Putin"?!

I mean, really! Who's kidding who, here?! Or should I say WHOM?!

Classical Studies and Reception Theory

I'm not sure how well I understand various literary theories. It may be that I am far below average when it comes to my ability to grasp them. I do, after all, officially have a mental disability, and this may be one example of it.

On the other hand, it may be that I understand literary theories better than almost anyone, and that above all, I understand how stupid and sad they all are, and how thoroughly there is no there there. Or it may be that my aptitude in understanding literary theories is about average.

It may be by far the most prudent to assume that the first of these possibilities is the case, that I have an unusually hard time distinguishing my discourse analysis from my post-modernism, and that therefore I should proceed very carefully. (I must apologize, and clarify in advance: I have not promised that I will proceed carefully, just acknowledged that I should.) For example, when I say that reception theory, extremely popular in the past several decades in Classical Studies (and perhaps in the academic study of literature more generally, I don't know), seems to me to consist of the study of the tradition of the Classics, which was a part of Classical Studies long before anyone called anything reception theory, plus a lot of pretentious malarkey, I ought to hasten to underscore that that's how it it seems to me, and that a lot of people with much more cred than I have gone on at great length about how it's actually a whole lot more than that,



and that I am the source of the malarkey here. Far be it from me to rule out, categorically, that my writing consists primarily of malarkey.

If I understand it correctly, the study of Classical Literature can be seen figuratively as movement in two opposite directions: the editor of a Classical text uses the evidence, mostly manuscripts of the primary text, to approach, as nearly as he or she can, the text as the author intended it. In the case of an ancient text which survives in a great number of manuscripts, one of the tasks of the editor is to eliminate from consideration those manuscripts which do not contribute to the establishment of the text. For example, if it is proven that an entire group of manuscripts derive entirely from another existing manuscript, than that entire group may be of very little or no interest to the editor in his capacity as editor. The study of that text's tradition, on the other hand, starts with the author and travels in the opposite figurative direction, studying the ways in which the author's text has reached readers directly via manuscripts and printed edition, and indirectly via translations, and other literary works which imitate or otherwise make reference to the first one, and also in other media such as visual art, music, movies and what have you. No matter how many manuscripts of one text there may be, it's somewhat harder to say that any of them are of no interest whatsoever in studying the text's tradition. Not to mention printed editions and translations, which may be of interest in editing a text as well, but primarily in cases where the other manuscripts are missing or have gaps or mistakes which cannot otherwise be remedied.

It seems to me that both of these directions, if you will, are perfectly natural ways of studying Classical literature. (Ah. I might as well mention now, in case I forget to later, that reception theory has greatly increased the number of texts which are considered to belong to the Classical canon -- mostly by including works composed at later dates.) Traditionally, more weight was given by Classical scholars to the editing of text, and the constant effort to improve upon previous editions. Editing texts was the dog, and study of the transmission was the tail.

Reception theory says that studying the transmission of the texts is the proper focus of literary study, the dog itself, with textual editing being relegated to the role of the tail. Except that reception theory goes farther, and claims that there is nothing of significance to be studied before that interaction of text and reader: the reception.

Except that they go farther, and seem to be, in some instances, quite hostile to the editors. And here, if not sooner, is where reception theory begins to seem like malarkey to me, because if the text with which the reader interacts is not rigorously defined in some way, such as, oh, for instance, its relationship to the text which the author wrote -- not the only way in which a text can be defined, to be sure, but a valid example! -- then we're no longer talking about the text at all, but anything and everything, which is to say: we're talking about nothing.

It may be that before reception theory, the editors went too far in dismissing the effect of the text which they constantly strove to improve. It seems to me that both editing and study the transmission are perfectly natural things to do, and that there's no need to choose between one or the other, or to decide which one is the dog and which the mere tail. I'm more temperamentally inclined toward studying the transmission in all of its sometimes vast variety. But I'm convinced that both directions, inward toward one imagined original text and outward into all of its sometimes far-flung effects and permutations, are essential parts of studying Classical literature.

I suppose it's much easier for me to say the latter than it is for academics, who have to argue over syllabi and degree requirements and so forth.

Still: Reception theory often presents itself, in so many words, as a "provocation" to more traditional approached to Classical Studies. Maybe there was a great deal lacking in earlier approaches to the Classics, which called for a radical break.

Maybe. Still, it is very easy to provoke, and to have provoked, to have upset someone, is far from a guarantee that one has said anything of any worth. The latter is not necessarily so easy.

I don't know very many of the players involved. I worry that reception theory may be discounting the worth of scholarly editing, which would be disastrous if reception theory proves to be more than a passing fad. But perhaps I misunderstand completely, and the provocation of which reception theory seems so proud is a provocation of which it should be proud: for example, if it's a challenge to entrenched tendencies of sexism and racism and other forms of bigotry within Classical Studies.

Praise From Obama or a Diss From Trump

I'm not good at making money. I would like to have lots and lots of money, but I never have had much. I think my difficulty with making money is one result of my autism. But I'm not sure about that.

For 9 years, the main thing I've been doing to try to earn money is writing this blog. That may be absurd. But I don't know what else to do.

I don't know how to market my blog. Some days I have very high page counts, some days very low. Some individual posts get many more views than others. But whatever happens, it's a surprise.

I daydream a lot about becoming financially successful. (Maybe that's a big part of my problem right there: maybe successful people never daydream about success. That would go directly counter to all of those motivational speakers and authors telling people to visualize success. But I don't think that necessarily means it's incorrect.)

The nearest approaches to success I've had so far with the blog, the biggest amounts of pageviews, have come when someone with a large readership mentions one of my posts: a popular blogger, or a magazine not terribly far from The Main Stream.

And so I daydream about people like Barack Obama doing things like tweeting about my blog. Seems like something like that could be a big boost toward my having something people would call a career. There are many people who could be a big help to me with a single mention, but I've been thinking -- daydreaming -- that perhaps no single person could help me more with a single tweet, than Barack Obama.

Then today I thought: what if Donald Trump tweeted about me? Would that help me even more than a tweet from Trump?

I can't imagine Obama tweeting something negative about me: either he'd have something nice to say, or, surely, he wouldn't go out of his way to diss a nobody like me. I can't imagine Trump tweeting anything but negative things about me. And as we know, he not above going out of his way to diss nobodies.

A tweet from Obama, something along the lines of:

"Here's a blog written by Steven Bollinger, an interesting writer who's not very well known. Essays on all sorts of topics, from wristwatches to renewable energy to politics to ancient Latin, and many other things. Thoughtful, witty, fascinating writing."

-- would almost certainly catapult me into what is known as a career. But what if Trump tweeted something like:

"Small-time creepy loser disabled autistic blogger, sympathetic to loser NYT and loser MSNBC and lib Dems, takes pathetic potshots at me. A complete loser in life, jealous of my huge success. What a pathetic jerk! Sad!"

? Many, many people now say up whenever Trump says down and night whenever he says day, and who can blame them? Almost certainly, many people would praise me and my writing just because Trump dissed me, without ever actually going to the trouble of reading something I'd written. Many others no doubt would actually read my blog because of Trump's tweet, and some of them might like it.

I wonder whether there's some action I could take which would lead directly toward my having financial success, something which has never occurred to me, but would've occurred to almost every non-autistic person in my position?

I wrote above that almost every reaction to a post on this blog is a surprise to me. There is one exception: posts like this one, in which I write about how badly I want fame and fortune, almost always get far fewer pageviews than my average post. That makes me sad for several reasons, one of which is that I think these posts are very interesting and entertaining. It's okay to laugh at these posts, it doesn't necessarily mean you're missing the point.

Dream Log: FB Meet-Up in the Mountains

Last night I dreamed I was meeting face-to-face for the first time with some Facebook friends: mostly friendly, non-judgmental, leftist, pro-science Christians.

Our meeting place was in a mountainous region. We parked in a lot surrounded by shops selling things like candy and tourist-y knickknacks. From there we had to keep going up on foot, up a very steep slope. We had the choice of climbing the mountain slope itself, or taking some stairs which were enclosed in sort sort of white plastic. I started to climb these stairs, but as they went higher the white plastic enclosure got closer, and very soon I became claustrophobic and climbed back down.

Then I noticed that there was another set of stairs. These were in a very spacious and sturdily-built stairwell of the kind one sees in fine early-20th-century public buildings in large US cities.

In the dream, the stairs were not entirely enclosed from the elements. It was very cold, there was snow on the ground, I had left my winter coat in my car, and after I had climbed a great distance, I realized that I should not have. As I climbed the stairs back down, I reflected that all of this physical exercise was good for me.

At the top of the stairs, we made various remarks about how this or that person was either just like this or that one had pictured him or her, or entirely different. After that sort of talk had died down, there was a lull in the conversation which seemed like it might last, but soon several lively conversations were going on on a variety of topics. I ended up talking about the stairwell with a young married couple. The young husband (there was a husband and a wife in this couple, in the traditional manner) went on for a while about the stairwell and the turn-of-the-20th-century American public architecture which it represented. In the dream, he seemed to be making many profound points, but now, awake, I can't remember any of them.

I mentioned that none of what he had said explained why this stairwell was semi-exposed to the elements, while most stairwells of its kind were fully enclosed within buildings. I hadn't meant to upset him with this remark, but it seemed I had greatly upset him. He turned away and didn't seem to want to talk any more. Then I woke up.